Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Smith grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. She briefly pursued linguistics at a small women's school, Beaver
College (now coed), before heading to San Francisco in search of Angela Davis
and Jane Fonda: "I was looking for the revolution" ( Mason, 50), she explains.
Acting classes at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco intervened, and by 1976 she had completed an MFA degree and obtained her Equity
card. Smith moved to New York, taught acting at Carnegie Mellon, and acted
in New York and San Francisco.

Her first professionally produced play, Aye Aye I'm Integrated, a monodrama,
was produced by the Women's Project where Anna was a member of the Directors Forum, an arena in which she tried out her performances of interviews
which catapulted her to national visibility. Her method of interviewing and then
performing verbatim the words of the people interviewed started as a teaching
device to help student actors get the words off the page. Intrigued with her
findings, Smith began taping and performing her interviews under the umbrella
title On the Road (to which she added A Search for American Character several
years later) for specific groups, such as women in law for whom she presented
her first public performance at their conference in 1985. Other early notable
performances included two presentations at the Women in Theatre conferences,
which sparked considerable debate and, subsequently, publication and scholarly
analyses. Frequent invitations to colleges followed, where Smith typically interviewed a cross section of people around some social issue. The interviews
on sexism led to the performance at Princeton University of Gender Bending:
On the Road/Princeton.

An interview with composer and conductor Tania Leon led to a full-length

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